I get goose bumps every single time I read this. The imagery, both through the word-painting (flap-flee, blackwhitewhiteblack) and the descriptions (the lime-green toupees of weed the near rocks wear, the surprised cormorant) is absolutely stunning.

From This to That

Stepping overboard from the dream-laden vessel of sleep– its cargo of foreign tongues, sunsplit stones of Italy, one colored bundle of kindlewood, and the music of God knows who played on the French horn by the poet’s only daughter–

you walk awhile by the actual tide-line, the ocean drawn back to expose sea rocks colonized by purple-painted tribes of young mussels, where three oystercatchers grown hysterical at the frightful sight of you leave their lethal business

among the molluscs and flap-flee over the waves in baffling blackwhitewhiteblack Escher flashes. You attend, then, to the lime-green toupees of weed the near rocks wear, take in the shoreline glint of scabious and coltsfoot, the quick ignitions

of a few leftover leaves of pink thrift, see one short-masted black trawler riding the waves, and spot the head and periscoped neck of a cormorant as it vanishes between breaths, reappears, and looks about as if surprised

to find the world as is–sky, sea, the rugged bulk of Mweelrea keeping one from the other–as you yourself look about, minding the seabird’s amphibian gift to live underwater and in air, to stand on its isolate perch in the wingspread very image

of a black phoenix rising. So stumble on to true wakefulness, all dreams dissipated, and stop silenced on a seal-smooth rock half-buried in sand, knowing nothing but the burden of what you’ve seen, weighing the simple specific gravity of it,